U.S. Supreme Court upholds death convictions of two Texas inmates

HOUSTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld death sentences for two Texas inmates, including a man accused of leading a gang responsible for several murders, and refused to reconsider the case of a British grandmother condemned for killing a woman and kidnapping her newborn son.

Dexter Darnell Johnson, 22, was convicted of the June 2006 shooting deaths of a young couple during a carjacking. Investigators said the Houston man was the ringleader of a group responsible for dozens of robberies and at least four homicides.

The justices also upheld the conviction of Max Soffar, 54, for a shooting rampage at a bowling alley that killed three people in 1980.

The court also refused to rehear its rejection of an appeal from Linda Carty, a 51-year-old British grandmother convicted of murdering her neighbor and taking the victim's 4-day-old son in 2001. Carty maintains her innocence, but prosecutors said she was desperate to have child after a miscarriage. The infant was found unharmed.

Carty is among 10 women on death row in Texas, the nation's busiest death penalty state. Thirteen lethal injections have been carried out this year and two more are scheduled for this week.

Execution dates haven't been set for Johnson, Soffar or Carty.

Johnson was condemned for the slayings of Maria Aparece, 23, of Sugar Land, and her 17-year-old boyfriend Huy Ngo, of Houston. Aparece was from the Philippines and a pre-nursing student. Ngo, who was Vietnamese, had moved to Houston with his family from France.

At the time of his arrest, Johnson was an 18-year-old ninth-grade dropout.

The couple was talking in Aparece's car outside Ngo's Houston home when they were confronted by Johnson and a companion, according to testimony at Johnson's trial. The victims were thrown in the backseat, driven away and robbed. Aparece was raped before both were forced into a wooded area and fatally shot in the head. Their bodies were found about a week later.

When a Harris County jury sentenced Johnson to death in 2007, he threw a chair in the courtroom and had to be tackled by sheriff's deputies.

Soffar spent 23 years on death row before a federal appeals court threw out his conviction in 2004, citing inadequate counsel. He was retried in 2006, and convicted again for the July 1980 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Arden Alane Felsher during a robbery of a Houston bowling alley. Two other people also were killed in the rampage: Stephen Allen Sims, 25, an assistant manager at the bowling alley, and Felsher's 17-year-old boyfriend, Tommy Lee Temple.

Gregory George Garner, then 18, was shot in the head and lost his left eye. He survived and testified against Soffar, who was not tried for the two other deaths.

Soffar and Johnson likely have another round of appeals before their executions become imminent, but Carty has nearly exhausted her appeals. Her lawyers sought a rehearing after the justices in early May refused to review her case.

Carty, originally from St. Kitts when it was part of the British Virgin Islands, had been in Houston nearly 20 years when she was arrested for the May 16, 2001, slaying of her Houston neighbor, Joana Rodriguez, and the abduction of Rodriguez's son.

She said she played no role in the crime, but prosecutors said Carty planned to steal Rodriguez's baby because she didn't want her common-law husband to leave her. The infant was found unharmed in a car. Rodriguez, 20, was found dead in the trunk of another car with her mouth and nose taped shut and a plastic bag over her head.

Carty has been seeking a new trial, contending her trial attorneys did little to defend her.

Her most recent appeals lawyer was obtained through the British government and Britain also had filed a brief supporting Carty's appeal before the high court.

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